exhibition

Reese-Heim

XC.HuA Gallery is delighted to present Dorothea Reese-Heim’s premier solo exhibition featuring site-specific, large scale installations. Dorothea Reese-Heim has built an astonishing career on the premise of the re-imagination of line, and by extension, of line within the context of form and space. The artist seeks to free line from the confines of conventional representation and artistic practices. For this purpose she has designed a new unique set of wire mesh constructs with centered Plexiglas disks that offers a solution to the traditional application of line. In turn, the gallery space is metaphorically transformed into a living drawing into which the viewer can transcend.

Reese-Heim’s understanding of line is extended to apply to the materials she chooses to work with. In this respect, the artist is interested in, and inspired by materials and substances which are light, translucent and flexible. Many of the erratic forms and shapes she creates underlie the vertical and horizontal organization of lines, in other words, self-manufactured wire-mesh constructs, or weave. She describes her process as creating diaphanous spatial sculpture that poetically exposes its own aesthetics. Moreover, Reese-Heim is severely fond of juxtaposing opposite forms and materials. For her this signifies freeing certain materials from the constrains of other media and representation. Artistic realization is not bound to a specific medium.

Beyond the revolution of line, material, shape and space, her works confront society with questions of sustainability, natural organic phenomena, artificial interference and the symbiosis of all three. To a certain extent the current exhibition explores the concept of color absence in nature. In the absence of naturalistic color the viewer is left with achromatic colors (black, white, grays and monochromatic colors) and refractions of light. Light is shed on concerns of colorlessness, neutrality and artificiality. For Reese-Heim this realization precedes the global phenomenon of artificial green-housing. Growth occurs in subterranean halls, on nutrient solutions, in plastic tubs, with plants facing artificial light. Transferred to the natural world everything would be artificial, bleak and empty; a sort of make-believe nature is the outcome. Reese-Heim’s work questions whether this is the inevitable conclusion to human evolution, or merely a vision of futuristic gloom.